Apt to be burned at the stake

Usage examples of heretical.

The Sultan even tolerated heretical Islamic offshoots like the Bahai, the Extreme Sufis, and the Yezidi or devil worshippers.

The Cathars were an offshoot of the Bogomils, an heretical movement that first flowered in the Balkans in the mid-tenth century, but which remained influential in the area until after the Cathars met their doom.

Mark: Clement explained that a licentious heretical group called the Carpocratians had come upon the secret gospel through deceitful means and that the text was not to be considered accurate.

A Pagan magistrate, who possessed neither leisure nor abilities to discern the almost imperceptible line which divides the orthodox faith from heretical depravity, might easily have imagined that their mutual animosity had extorted the discovery of their common guilt.

The bizarre part was that the infectious particles are unique, consisting of only protein and containing no DNA or RNA, a proposition so scientifically heretical that the study of these particles and the diseases they produce had already generated Nobel Prizes for medicine in two different years.

Far away over Long Island Sound came the first distant rumble of thunder, and he knew this was no storm that any scientist less heretical than Jung or Wil-helm Reich would ever understand.

Today the Mandaean religion is, frankly, a hopelessly confused hotchpotch: various fragments of Old Testament Judaism, heretical Gnostic forms of Christianity and Iranian dualist beliefs are all mixed into their cosmology and theology.

Whether It Is Permissible to Receive Communion from Heretical, Excommunicate, or Sinful Priests, and to Hear Mass Said by Them?

Objection 1: It seems that one may lawfully receive Communion from heretical, excommunicate, or even sinful priests, and to hear mass said by them.

Galileo engaged in a protracted controversy on the priority of discovery and the nature of sunspots with yet another Jesuit priest, Christopher Scheiner, which developed into a bitter personal antagonism and which is thought by many historians of science to have contributed to the house arrest of Galileo, the proscription of his books, and his confession, extracted under threat of torture by the Inquisition, that his previous Copernican writings were heretical and that Earth did not move.

But the conception of purgatory as it was held by the early Christians, whether orthodox Fathers or heretical sects, was merely the just and necessary result of applying to the subject of future punishment the two ethical ideas that punishment should partake of degrees proportioned to guilt, and that it should be restorative.

Malipiero was sorry that I had taken my text from any heretical poet, although he was pleased that my sermon was not interlarded with Latin quotations.

The infidels outside the Occupied Zones still hid their heretical priests, and it was almost as bad inside the OZ.

The reigning Kronian model of what had taken place traced back to heretical challenges to orthodox astronomy that had first been proposed in the mid-twentieth century and held that after its violent birth, Venus had careened about the Solar System as a loose cannon, disturbing the orbits of both Earth and Mars and eventually circularizing its own orbit to become the planetary body familiar in modern times.

A fine of ten pounds of gold (above four hundred pounds sterling) was imposed on every person who should dare to confer, or receive, or promote, an heretical ordination: and it was reasonably expected, that if the race of pastors could be extinguished, their helpless flocks would be compelled, by ignorance and hunger, to return within the pale of the Catholic church.